The self-proclaimed leader of international hacking group Lulz Security has been arrested by AFP – Australian Federal Police – on the New South Wales central coast. The AFP says the 24-year-old man was arrested in the Gosford suburb of Point Clare yesterday.

He has been charged with two counts of unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment and one count of unauthorised access to a restricted computer system. The AFP says he claims to be in charge of Lulz Security, or LulzSec, which has previously claimed responsibility for high-profile hacking attacks, includinga DDS attack that took the CIA website offline, and a hack which caused some serious headaches for Sony Corp.

UPDATE! 24 April 2013: Aush0k has been named as Mathew Flannery – aush0k@live.com – The hacking community is in serious doubt at claims that the man is the leader of the now defunct online activist group LulzSec.

Concerns have also been raised by IT security experts over the Flannery’s employment at Content Security, a business that specialises in online security. The company denied that Flannery had access to any sensitive customer data, in a statement Content Security’s managing director Phil Wurth said ” Flannery was a low level support tech.”

To Date there doesn’t seem to be any evidence at all to suggest that Flannery was even affiliated with LulzSec, or is a leader of the group. Infact the group was disbanded in 2011 because it’s members were arrested.

Flannery seems so far to be all bluster, his Facebook page declares he works for the FBI as a “Special Agent, cybercrime intelligence unit.”

His LinkedIn page has him working for Tenable Network Security – the company denies this emphatically – he also claims to work in Network Security, Penetration Testing and Computer Forensics, though his [confirmed] employer say he works in a Call Centre as low level support.

Perhaps more telling is that the hacktivist community has almost unanimously ditched any notion that Flannery had anything to do with LulzSec :: Read the full article »»»»